Thursday, March 18, 2010

Love Your Leadership

Glenn Greenwald says health care reform proves that progressives can't maintain threats that they'll vote no unless legislation fits their preferences. I think that's basically right, and there are structural reasons why that's the way things are going to be. Progressives would much rather have a half-strength bill or even a quarter-strength bill than no bill. Centrists know that, and know that their votes are essential to the effort. So they're confident that the progressives will cave to some pretty hefty demands. And they're right! You didn't really need to run the experiment to prove this.

Given this dynamic, how is it that we're on the brink of passing a comprehensive bill that covers 32 million people, shuts down lots of insurance abuses, saves $130 billion in the first decade, and then saves a gargantuan $1.2 trillion in the next? Why didn't centrists manage to slice all that into oblivion along with the public option?

One thing is that a lot of reasonable centrist demands are in fact incorporated into the legislation. All that deficit cutting is good stuff, and I'd guess that some of the more conscientious centrists were genuinely brought on board by it. Not all conservative Democrats are named 'Bart Stupak.'The second thing is that the Democratic leadership right now is awesome. Particularly in the House, where Nancy Pelosi is in charge, and the three relevant committees were run by solid liberals. And whatever negative things one might say about Harry Reid, he had to hold onto 60 votes, and if he lost the public option doing it, what can we expect when Lieberman and Nelson are the swing votes?

Simply announcing the intention to do fundamental health care reform was a big move in this process. You do that, and then if you can only pass something small, everyone will know it was defeat. Centrists don't want 'Democrats try to pass big health care reform, fail, settle for aspirin subsidies' to be the result. That reflects badly on the party and puts them in electoral danger. So they can slice off a public option here, do weird things with abortion funding there... but they have to be nervous about wrecking the basic structure of the legislation. Whoever made the call to go for comprehensive reform -- and "Barack Obama" is the first name that should be mentioned here, yeah? -- did really well for us.

who we are

Nicholas Beaudrot is an accidental political observer living in Seattle, Washington. By day he writes software for Amazon.com, snowboards, and plays ultimate frisbee. By night [and morn] he posts to this blog, runs the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally, and tries to cook decent Italian cuisine. A graduate of Brown University with a joint degree in Mathematics-Computer Science, in late 2003 Nicholas felt the urge to put his knack with numbers towards a greater social purpose than winning his fantasy baseball league or taking up poker, perhaps in an act of penance for not voting in 2000. He has been spotted standing in line for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, on the Atlanta area quiz bowl program "Hi-Q", and as a young boy in national broadcasts of the Christmas Eve service at the Cathedral of Saint Philip. If you play Halo 3, Team Fortress II, Rock Band 2, Catan, or a number of other games, he's on Xbox live as niq24601.

Neil Sinhababu is a philosophy professor at the National University of Singapore. It's a tropical island with good public transit and they're very nice about not caning him. He's fond of red-state college towns like Austin, where he got his PhD. Much of his research is in ethics — hence his alias "Neil the Ethical Werewolf," which contains the name of his philosophy blog. He has also published on Nietzsche and on how to have a girlfriend in another universe. His utilitarianism shapes his goals and tactical views, and makes it impossible for him to stay away from politics. At Harvard, he won a student government election by eating fire in each dorm room in his district. He'd be happy to use this skill to help Democrats in tough races. He likes drinking with smart people and dancing in altogether ridiculous ways. At his last project, War or Car, he showed that you could buy each US household a Prius or each panda a stealth bomber for the price of the Iraq War.